The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel полностью

Walters nodded. “You’ll be talking to Nash in ten days.” Dominika could not shake his hand; she had heard that the FSB had absolutely stopped deploying metka when its use against Western diplomats became an embarrassing international story in the heady years of glastnost, but CIA continued the prophylactic protocol nonetheless. “You trust Putin wouldn’t ever start spritzing our asses again?” Gable had snorted. When they saw each other in Vienna, she would ask Nate about any results from using spy dust on SUSAN.

Her Nate. As mad as she had been at him in Athens, she missed him and yearned to see him.

She smiled at him. “You know your way back? Take care with the thermos. And thank you for the watch and glasses.”

Walters shrugged on his backpack. “Stay safe, Dominika,” he said. “I’ll come out anytime, anyplace, if you need me. I’ll be checking the signal sites every day.” He turned and disappeared around a bend in the streambed, stirring the ground fog as he moved. Let one of the seventeenth-century Tartar ghosts living in the mossy Golosov Ravine speed you safely home, Dominika thought.

Benford raved in his office, prompting Dotty, his secretary of eight years, to shake her head in warning at various CID officers who wished to speak with the Chief this morning. “Best not; perhaps this afternoon” was the whispered refrain.

Dominika’s newest tidbit about MAGNIT’s being looked at by the president for a big job should have made sorting the possibles easier, but he needed a name. Benford already suspected and feared the worst: the senior vacancy that the Kremlin was steering MAGNIT toward was the one the Russians themselves had created by killing his friend Alex Larson—DCIA. He knew he was looking for a senior figure who, sometime in the last decade, had known enough about the US Navy railgun to have reported technical details to the Russians. The scores of witting navy personnel—officers, enlisted, scientists, and civilian contractors—could now in theory be whittled down, as none of them was likely to be tapped by the president. Or was it someone they had not thought of? Of the dozen high-ranking bureaucrats, only the current secretary of the Department of Energy had occasionally been briefed on the railgun, but he had spent years in other departments on other projects. According to Dominika, MAGNIT had been an active reporting source for a decade. An anomaly. Could she have misreported the facts? More ominous, could that slick bastard Anton Gorelikov be parceling variants of the same story to different people—called a barium enema in the Game—as a loyalty test to see which variant later surfaced to finger the traitor?

In London, MI6 called the barium trap a blue-dye test, describing the same mole-catching principle metaphorically as pouring blue dye down a pipe to observe from which downstream outlet the dye would eventually issue. At a counterintelligence liaison conference in London several years earlier, Benford had declared the British terminology idiotic, pointing out that pipes—especially the decrepit plumbing in the United Kingdom and Europe—became clogged, or they broke underground, and that the metaphor of a barium enema was more to his liking. “That, Simon, is because you are an uphill gardener,” said C, the Chief of Six, which slang Benford did not understand, and no one told him it meant sodomite. Thank God for the special relationship, breathed the Brits in the room.

Gable and Forsyth met Benford in the Executive Dining Room at Langley for lunch, where they tossed around ideas and theories. The elegant room—as narrow as the dining car on a train—on the executive seventh floor of Headquarters, overlooking the tree-lined Potomac River, featured tables placed closely together, so that new arrivals were forced to walk between them, nodding to friends or cutting enemies. Everyone saw everyone else, and with whom they were lunching, and the cabals and cliques and gangs among the seniors at Langley were therefore common knowledge. Benford ordered a plate of pasta with anchovies, parsley, pangrattato, and lemon, while Forsyth chose the crab bisque, and Gable, the grilled shrimp.

“This alarms me,” said Benford, slurping pasta. “A Russian mole could wind up in the Cabinet room.”

Gable stabbed a shrimp. “What I don’t get is that Domi says the fucker’s been working for a decade,” he said. “That means his previous job was of interest to the Ruskies.”

“I’m worried it’s a trap, a test before Putin gives her the SVR job,” said Forsyth. “Christ, we vet our directors before putting them forward. So might the Kremlin.”